Author: hawkandyoung

Picture credit Today we lost Stephen Hawking, whose brilliant mind shaped modern cosmology. Science's Brightest Star Dies at age 76. His passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake. But it's not empty. Think of it as a kind of vacuum energy permeating the fabric of spacetime that defies measure. Stephen Hawking, RIP 1942-2018.... Continue Reading →

We all know that Astronauts lose muscle and bone mass in space, as well as suffer from space sickness, but there are two larger problems with traveling to Mars. One is the radiation. Astronauts in the International Space Station are orbiting Earth well within the magnetosphere. Like a shield, the magnetosphere deflects most of the... Continue Reading →

Straight from the epic ending of an apocalyptic science fiction novel, or the beginning of a new planet terra-formed to host life, one planet is fried by a giant solar flare, or stellar flare as we call it when it is not OUR sun but some other star. After a re-analysis of data from March... Continue Reading →

Michael Varnum, a social psychologist at Arizona State University in Tempe had 500 volunteers answer a few online questions about aliens. He analyzed the responses for words indicating positive emotion, such as “nice,” and negative emotion, like “worried" as well as for reward- and risk-focused words, such as “benefit” and “danger.” People generally used more... Continue Reading →

Photo by Hawk's friend in Florida, Richard Thomas. He saw it from his back yard! This is the space ship loaded with a Tesla car and a dummy named "Starman". In addition to carrying a plaque with the names of 6,000 SpaceX employees, the car also transported a data storage device containing Isasac Asimov’s classic... Continue Reading →

We post a lot on aliens, the potential for their existence. Our little solar system is a blip in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and it takes between 9 and 12 and a half years to fly from Earth to Pluto in a spaceship traveling at 50,000 km/h. To fly across the Milky Way... Continue Reading →

Today one of my favorite authors of all time died. Ursula K. LeGuin was an amazing writer whose stories dragged me all over the water planet of Earthsea. Her short stories transformed the world around me. I would often emerge from her worlds and have to remind myself what year it was. Not only did... Continue Reading →

You are going to LOVE Xar! X4-R is a robot, a Zarook, on a planet at the edge of the Hawthorn nebula. He's a mop. You can call him Xar. His job becomes more complicated when he stumbles upon T-N4, or Tina, and a ship he never could process before. His directives change, leading a... Continue Reading →

On January 3, 2008, Young was driving down the highway at Navarre Beach, Florida when he pulled over to capture this video. The object took off. It was raining, so he drove out of the storm and happened to see it AGAIN and took this second video. The ship was going in and out of... Continue Reading →